Game 1 - Vs Space Wolves (Andy Currie)
I was worried about this one going into the tournament. The first match up was very important.. catapult into a decent position where you tend to face more typical tournament lists, you know the ones - we all design our armies around beating the top table stuff, not the random mid to lower table stuff.. plus, a loss would pretty much stop me in my tracks..

The army was solid enough (you can look back and check it out) - a lot of lascannons and plasma cannons, plenty of missiles, Rune Priests, Speeders and a Dread. But the commander, Andy, had not played a lot of 40k recently and was at the tournament to get in some games! He lived in *insert remote Scottish place* and couldn't get a regular game. Solid army and plenty of nouse, but Andy needs to get more games in! I'd much rather have played Andy towards the end of the tournament so that he could represent himself better. I last caught up with him after the 4th game and he had won his first game - we casually joked that he would lose all of day one and then get into the swing of it for day two... I sincerely hope that that was the case and Andy continued his streak!

The game itself? Andy took first turn in DoW.. I kept all of the table, did not seize and let him drop his drop pod in. He plopped it near to one of the objectives deep in my half. His army rolled on centrally and pushed as far forward as possible.
I came on and cut his dreadnought in half with Warscythe fly over and ate his Drop Pod with Scarabs.. I let him push in once more, moving 12" to minimise Scarab damage, get into cover and position. From here I lashed out and took him down. Whilst obviously more stuff happened than that.. nothing tactically stood out for me.

Game 2 - Vs Space Wolves (Alex West)
Gave Alex deployment and first, he deployed centrally keeping his Logan-Bomb off table in its Pod. Alex pushed the centre in a big rush, 2 rhinos packed, drop pod on my right with Logan, 2 LW's running and keeping pace in centre. Long Fang packs and CML 5 man WG pack at the rear with them.

I was deployed in my nicely spread out Deep Strike defence with Immortals on the outside, then Scarabs then Barges, Warriors in reserve.

So, big moves - Turn 1, Alex had pushed forward so I wanted to take advantage of this and take out his rear unit of troops whilst also taking out one of the Long Fang packs, the idea being that he would then have to bring at least one of his packs back to claim secondary objective and that table quarter (primary).

I bring my magic deep strike dice out for the 2 squads of Immortals to Veil over and do their thing..except..well, one of them hits about right and then the second scatters MASSIVELY..onto his CML squad..shit. I, of course, roll a 2 and they die.

Balls. Plan over and a big (285pt) unit dead. Not enough shooting to kill multiple targets. I get to take on 1850 with 1550 now..joy.

In fairness, this is the first time the double veil dudes have ever deep struck..I guess I had it coming. Over the tournament they mishapped twice more, in the same turn from the same point and Rich and his IG placed them miles away in the corner..luckily they just bombed in next time.

Anyway. I struggled here on in.. Over the course of the game I gunned down pretty much everything apart from one immobilised rhino with a lone grey hunter in it and the Long Fangs at the back of the board.
Unfortunately, with the lack of mobile anti infantry firepower, it took me a lot longer than usual to gun down Logan et al, Lone Wolves etc.. so I was unable to get the lone grey hunter claiming a table quarter.

On my part, I ran a unit of Warriors into the top left table quarter to draw the game/primary mission, but rolled a 2 and the unit was not completely within the one table quarter.. the rules state that the unit must be WHOLLY within one table quarter.. so straddling two quarters didn't help.

Only other thing of real interest was Alex sniping my second Pulse Cryptek with a nicely drawn Jaws line. Other than that it was business as usual, I just didn't have the complete, killer anti infantry I usually have to bring to bear.. ah well. Well played Alex. I won on Secondary and gained a few tournament points from that and VP's were ...hmm...can't remember.. so many games.. lol!

These will crop up over the next few days.. Thing I'll take from Game 2? I'd do that shit again! It was a wonderful plan and the execution was near perfect...the placement of the unit was fine, the risk was high, but the rewards would have been worth it. Sometimes you have to go for it in order to win big. Could I have stayed put and used their firepower elsewhere? Yeah for sure..would it have had as big an impact? well, over the course of the game? Sure...but an initial big push can really put a dude off their game..that's what I was going for.. next time Alex.. lol!